- Report: #1027780
Complaint Review: Gary Swart - Internet Internet
Reported By:
ODeskReview -
San Francisco, California, USA
Submitted:
Updated:
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Author Confirmed
Why?
Gary Swart
Internet, Internet, United States of America
Phone:
Web:
www.odesk.com
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Gary Swart Gary Swart ODesk ODesk contractors are using computer bots to run up large bills, but ODesk ignores it to boost their sales Internet
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I am the CEO of a software company, SearchMan LLC, working on the industry's first do-it-yourself SEO software.
We are located in San Francisco and found out about ODesk.com which is nearby. We needed a function created and I hired a contractor by the name of Louie Santiano. He billed at $16.67 an hour which was fair and at first his work was great. However, after a year, he stopped responding to emails, but was showing a high level of work output through the ODesk Desktop App which monitors their work output. It turns out that the contractor disappeared, but was having a computer bot type in "0", "backspace", "0", "backspace" etc, to keep the work output high so he could keep billing.
I understand that Odesk is not responsible for work output, for obvious reasons.
However, my concerns with Odesk are:
1) My Odesk dashboard said he was doing a decent work output (based off the green bar). If you click on the per minute outline, he was doing a few keyboard clicks every few minutes, with no mouse movements. The Odesk dashboard should have not been telling me he was doing a high level of output.
2) He clearly had a bot as we discovered in screenshots. He was building us a bot to do similar things, so he has the knowledge. Also, you can recognize patterns with the amount of keyboard clicks if you analyze it. The ODesk App should pick up on bots like this. Why were we paying a hefty 10% then??
After research, it turns out that contractors have this program and share it with eachother so they can bill for hours they are not working. ODesk needs to fix this problem. It is incredibly easy to detect a bot like this being utilized. I am only a decent programmer and I could create ODesk software that could detect a bot.
I talked to Ashley O'Dell, who is the supervisor of the complaint department. She agreed that it was ridiculous that ODesk doesn't have a detection for these automated bots, and that Odesk should't be telling me he had a high level of work output when he hadn't moved his computer mouse in weeks and was only typing in "0, backspace, 0 backspace". She said she would reach out to the upper management so we could get our money back and so they could fix this problem. It turns out, upper management and Gary Swart have no interest in fixing this situation. Obviously, it is because if they admit this problem is rampant with their contractors, then they would lose their nice 10% commission on lots of contracts.
Now, I have to take ODesk and Gary Swart to court to get our $21,000+ back. Gary Swart owns a scam of a company. Use Elance instead, it is much better.
